blog posts

Ghostwriters . . . who ya gonna call?

The New York Times reports that people are turning to ghostwriters to help them write text messages, dating profiles, and status updates, the kind of personal writing that most of us used to do for ourselves along with our shopping lists, thank you notes, and diary entries.

It used to be that ghostwriters wrote only for the rich and famous: their autobiographies, or their keys to a bigger bank account or a better world. Ghosts wrote speeches for politicians. They wrote college entrance essays for students whose parents could afford their fees. Once those students got in, the ghosts wrote their term papers. And ghostwriters wrote the commencement addresses of college presidents who presided over institutions where plagiarism was supposed to be a capital crime.

Occasionally a tongue-tied suitor would ask a Cyrano to write a love letter.

But now that the internet has turned us all into writers, ordinary people are calling ghostwriters to help them post online. Sometimes it's just getting advice from someone we trust about a subject line or a picture caption. But sometimes it’s paying a ghost to craft the perfect update. Or the imperfect one. Trump-watchers like to suss out which outrageous tweets Trump wrote himself, and which were composed “in the style of Trump” by a member of his staff.

The internet began as a free-wheeling space that would democratize writing. Turning everyone with a keyboard into a writer would take writing out of the hands of specialists. Along the way, we could ditch those school rules. Upper case, lower case? No biggie. Spelling and punctuation? Who needs 'em? Subject-verb agreement? It’s for losers. No teacher was going to cover that email in red ink; no boss was going to send that .pdf back for revision.

But that’s not what happened.

As writing online became routine, it also became “respectable.” The city slickers civilized the wild, wild digital frontier, bringing with them their Funk & Wagnalls, their Strunk & White, and their Times New Roman. The default quickly became the only serious game in town.

There was an old radio ad for a vocabulary-building course that used the ominous tag, “People judge you by the words you use.” Digital writing was supposed to free us from that sort of linguistic insecurity. It isn't doing that, either.

As more and more people stake their self-worth on likes and swipes and followers, even the most casual post can become a source of anxiety that leads to poster’s block. Putting our words online exposes every flaw and blemish of our prose to grammar-shamers who judge us mercilessly by the words we use. Or worse yet, nobody responds to what we post. No 🧡, no 😀, not even a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That kind of silence can make even a confident writer freeze up.

Today’s electronic prose can seem as high-stakes as conventional dead tree writing, so those emails, tweets and instas have to be letter perfect, A++, heart heart heart, every single one. And those dating profiles? 🌶🌶🌶🌶, if not 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶. Insecure writers are no longer satisfied with advice like, “Write what you know, kill your darlings, and don’t use Comic Sans.” Now with so much riding on a single post, the online writer demands, “Do it for me. I can pay.”

Outsourcing personal writing may be fine for public figures. For some people, like Trump or Anthony Weiner, it may be an even better option than trusting their own words. But when it comes to most personal writing, remember that things didn’t end well for the guy who asked Cyrano to write that love letter for him (spoiler alert: he dies). And they didn’t end well for Cyrano. The quintessential ghost (he dies, too) is best remembered for his long nose, not his skillful status updates.